


it's the ones you lose that count

by mushydesserts



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Angst, Bad Ending, Character Study, Gen, M/M, Train Argument, What-If, chapter 10, gladio being stupid, gladio puts on the ring, noct isn't doing much better, slight whump, the Lucii are the worst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-28 12:05:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11417604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mushydesserts/pseuds/mushydesserts
Summary: The ring fell to the floor between them. Noct looked down, but didn't move to pick it up. He looked almost afraid to touch it. They stood frozen for a long moment.Then Gladio said, "Fine." He bent.Noct's face drained of all color. "Gladio, wait," he said, and reached out a moment too late.Gladio put on the ring.(Yelling at the gods is a Lucian pastime. Kinkmeme fill.)





	it's the ones you lose that count

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt,](https://ffxv-kinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/3892.html?thread=5203764#cmt5203764) about Gladio getting fed up and putting on the Ring of the Lucii.

 

Noct's drawn, pale face is the last thing Gladio sees.

Dark shadows under the Prince's (still a prince to him, always a prince) eyes, hair a mess, clothes rumpled from not stepping out of them for a week. Noct hadn't spoken to them in days. Weeks. Since they left Altissia. He barely responded to Prompto, despite the blond's subdued efforts to shake him out of his miserable stupor. He let Gladio arrange their accomodations, speak to people at the desks and behind the counters, gather their supplies and manage their inventory; he waited for everything to be ready, then marched straight to bed and to sleep. He let them worry about the rest. He emerged for meals, which were left half-eaten, but always returned to the cabin afterwards without a word.

He hadn't even spoken to _Ignis_. To Ignis, who Prompto always made sure to sit within arms' reach of, because Prompto actually gave a damn about what Ignis might be feeling. To Ignis, who needed to be led around like a child and who clearly hated it with every breath. To Ignis, who still stumbled every time he had to navigate a set of stairs, who felt weakly along the walls for the light switch before realizing it wouldn't help, whose breath still hitched in pain when he slept sometimes.

All because of Noctis, because of a king who wouldn't even so much as glance in his direction, who couldn't be assed to so much as check on someone who'd cared for him since he was four years old and who had nearly died for him and who would probably never see again now because of him.

Ignis wasn't saying anything. Gladio still knew he was afraid, knew he worried Noct wouldn't want him around anymore, knew he thought he was useless in this shape. He couldn't cook, couldn't drive, couldn't take care of anyone. Couldn't do the things that made him _Ignis_. Ignis wouldn't mourn aloud — he was too disciplined for it — but these things were clear to anyone who spent a second looking at him.

Which Noct hadn't done.

Noct hadn't done _anything_.

And so one painful morning, after watching Noct ignore the three people in the world who would unhesitatingly die for him for yet another day, Gladio broke.

Noct had wanted to stop in Tenebrae, to say one last goodbye to a woman he hadn't seen in ten years. A woman who'd died doing her duty, who'd died so that he could do the duty he was born for, and for what? For Noct to hide away, to mope, to let the war rage on, let the darkness swallow their home and country? To not give a shit about the people who'd given up everything for him along the way?

"You think you're a king, but you're a coward," Gladio hissed.

"I get it, all right?" Noct shouted. His hand was clenched around the ring in his pocket. "I get it. You think this is easy for me?"

Gladio had seen him looking at the thing from time to time as if hoping it'd give him some answers, like a fucking crystal ball. If he was going to lug it around with him like a security blanket, the least he could do was wear the thing. Like his father had done. Like his _ancestors_ had done. Like he was supposed to do.

"Sure doesn't look hard to sit there with your head up your ass," Gladio said.

His hand was fisted in the front of Noct's jacket, and Noct's hand was fisted in the front of his. Prompto tried to step in. Gladio shoved him aside. Noct shoved him back, hand in the centre of his chest. In the scuffle, there was a clatter.

The ring fell to the floor between them. Noct looked down, but didn't move to pick it up. He looked almost afraid to touch it.

They stood frozen for a long moment.

Then Gladio said, "Fine."

He bent.

Noct's face drained of all color. "Gladio, wait," he said, and reached out a moment too late.

Gladio put on the ring.

 

 

Time

 

stopped.

 

 

Everything goes silent,

vivid and dark

at once.

 

Gladio can see Noct frozen in front of him, hand outstretched, mouth open. Somewhere to the left, Prompto is pushing himself off the back of a bench. Ignis is still sitting with his face to the window, seeking the warmth of a sun Gladio can't sense either. There are other people on the train, and Gladio can't see any of them.

Gladio's breath catches. The ring is cold on his finger, a burning chill that spreads into the air. The air feels like a weight. He couldn't take it off now if he tried.

In the corner of his eye, he sees a flicker of fire.

The flash of blue light is familiar.

He knows it. It's the same phantom glass-steel glow they've seen every time Noct called up the royal arms in battle. Only closer now, like a static shock raising all the hairs on his arms.

Another flicker, and it burns bright. Brighter. Everything washes into a blur of blue and grey, and the sense of space expands upwards, an endless fog hanging above. A blast of cold hits his skin, and the air wavers as if warping in heat. Gladio flinches.

As his eyes adjust, the rest of the world falls away.

A voice comes, deep like thunder. Gladio isn't sure whether he hears it so much as feels it.

    **"You are familiar, mortal."**

Gladio's limbs are numb.

Another joins.

   "You have no royal blood."

   "Your duty was to a king."

This was for Noct, Gladio thinks suddenly. This was meant for Noct.

   "You are familiar."

A new voice rings out like rocks grinding against each other, like the echo of an avalanche.

_"Foolish."_

Gladio swallows. He doesn't say anything.

   "You seek to take power by force, unworthy one?"

Gladio licks his lips. "That's — not what I'm here for," Gladio says.

   "What are you here for, mortal?"

Gladio can't think. He doesn't know. He'd just — .

"Someone needed to do it," he says, quiet.

More than one voice splits the air, a harsh chorus, cold and sharp.

**_"Not you."_ **

This was meant for Noct.

Gladio had taken the ring from Noct.

He'd taken the ring from _Noct._

   "Your duty was to serve a king, but here you are."

   "You seek to take the throne by force, mortal?"

"No," Gladio stammers. "No."

   "You thought him unworthy," the voice says. "You sought to judge a king unworthy?"

   "Only the Lucii can decide who is worthy."

The voice is cutting, disgusted.

   "You betray your king."

Gladio feels his blood run cold. "No." He clenches his hand. "I'd never." It comes out uncertain.

The voices, dismissive and furious, pay him no heed.

   "Then why are you here?"

   "You seek the power of the Lucii for yourself."

   "Betrayer."

   "Usurper."

   "Usurper!"

"No!" Gladio shouts.

The voices are unmoved.

   "Man is a fool creature. We are the wards."

   "You hope to take on the burden of the king without the blood of a king, without the understanding of a king. You are no king. You will fail."

   "Unworthy, and cursed to remain so."

   "You fail your duties now, Shield, and you still hope for more?"

Something twists in Gladio's chest, awful in his gut.

It's the same feeling he's fought down for what feels like years now. Ever since the papers sang out the fall of Insomnia. Since he first tried to call Iris outside the city, and only heard the phone ring, and ring, and ring. Since they laid Jared's broken body to rest, Talcott gripping his hand in quiet terror. Since Ravus clutched Noctis's throat and threw Gladio aside like a rag doll outside an Imperial base. Since Altissia.

Since he looked at a ten-year-old boy who wouldn't eat his vegetables and thought, _I would die for you. And you won't even raise a finger to keep yourself alive._

He swallows the black bile down. "I care about my duty," he says.

   "You? You have done nothing to protect your king," the voice says.

Astrals. He'd tried. There's a mark on his face and another on his chest, and he'd faced down a god for the kid, and then when the Empire came, when they came —

"He's still alive, ain't he?" Gladio says, voice cracking.

   "You chide and coddle him. You call him Prince, deny his rightful title. You do not defend him. What worthy Shield could say the same?"

   "The Chosen King deserves a worthy Shield."

   "Instead, he was given you."

   "Pity."

   "Traitor."

Gladio tries to rise from his knees. He can't. The ring is heavy on his finger, too heavy, so cold, turning the air thick like smoke.

   "The Chosen King will suffer no loss," the voices sigh,

 

and Gladio begins to burn.

 

The pain is blinding. It starts at his fingertips and crawls down his arm, a licking, withering heat. Gladio cries out. He clutches at his wrist as if he could rip his own arm off, but the heat worsens, molten metal from the inside. The pain draws the breath from his lungs, eating his skin, his bones; his vision fades at the edges. He's a soldier. He's used to pain, but this?

Worse than the pain is the whisper in the back of his mind.

It echoes, implacable, like the voices he'd left behind in the depths of Lucis. _This is how you die,_ it says.

_Graceless, prideless, useless. A disappointment. Judged and found wanting, as always._

_Stop,_ he wants to plead.

_So many deaths. Yours will be worse than a waste. Your sacrifice will protect no one._

Gladio grits his teeth.

_Who do you call coward? Your king? Or yourself?_

**"Wait."**

The pain immediately subsides.

Gladio looks up.

The new voice is quieter, gentler. There's a wistfulness to it, a clear quality. It sounds younger, a humming brook compared to the roaring seas of the others.

   "Leave him be," it says.

_King Regis._

Of course.

"Your Majesty," Gladio blurts out.

There is a silence from Regis, considering but not unkind. The other phantom figures surrounding Gladio shift.

   "You cannot save them all, young king," one of the old voices says, flat and dispassionate.

   "I do not seek to do so," Regis says. "But I know this: the Chosen King needs this one."

There is a pause as the kings absorb this.

Gladio cradles his arm and draws his knees up on the ground beneath him. He feels lightheaded. _Noct,_ he thinks, heart pounding. Would Noct have been here too if Luna hadn't saved him? Could Noct end up here still, if they failed him now?

The voices start up, less hostile now.

   "He carries the blessing of the First Shield," one of them says.

Another voice sounds displeased.

   "The mark of a broken Shield to a Cursed King. It means nothing."

   "This may be true. And yet countless warriors have been judged unworthy through his Trial," another says. "This one lives yet."

   "There is more still for him to do," Regis says, soft.

   "He's done enough," one says, frosty.

Gladio shouldn't interrupt. His tongue is stiff in his mouth. "Your Majesty," Gladio coughs anyway. He doesn't know why. He feels desperate, compelled to speak. "Sir. I — I need to get back to Noct." Noct. Regis' _son._ Didn't they care about that here? "Just — let me _fight_ for him." He needed to — he'd _promised_ Noct, that — isn't that why he's _here?_

   "For the boy you call Prince?" one says. "Or for yourself?"

   "For your past? For your country?"

   "For your life?"

   "For your king?"

   "Or for what is to come?"

   "We guard this world's future," another rasps. "We save many. Not one."

Gladio doesn't know. He doesn't know.

   "You should not have flown for us," one says, voice like a breath.

Gladio thinks of his own father's hand heavy on his shoulder, pressing down on the feathers on his skin, wings that could never take him away from his fate.

_A Shield does not run._

A Shield has no life of its own.

"I fight for the King," Gladio whispers.

_Noctis._

He remembers now Noct's furor outside the wreckage of Insomnia, watching the city burn, watching its people burn. Noct been so _angry._

_I fight for Noctis._

   "Others have fought for his king as well," a voice says, emotionless. "He is not the only one. He will not be the last to do so."

Regis' voice finally murmurs through the mist again.

   "But he is one the Chosen King needs," Regis says, subdued.

Silence.

For a moment, the dark veil lifts, and Gladio can see Noct again on the other side, still kneeling in front of him, eyes big, unseeing. He's still reaching out, one hand hovering. Reaching for Gladio.

Noct hasn't been eating enough. Gladio can see the bones in his wrist. Astrals. Gladio would kill to give him back the lazy summer fishing, the days wading along the beach, the evenings playing King's Knight outside the camper again, but there isn't time for that. There's never been. _Can't you just pretend?_ Prompto had whined at him once in a moment of weakness, fear in that bright smile, and Gladio had thought, _for how long?_

Gladio stares at Noct. He doesn't know why he forgets they're all still young.

The kings; the kings are ancient.

The voices cut through the image, shattering it.

   "Very well. We leave him be."

Gladio lets out a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding. He's shaking. His arm still tingles.

   "Yes," Regis agrees. The light flickers. Regis speaks again. "He carries his shield with that arm. We shall not mark him."

Gladio holds his arm close. He remembers Gilgamesh's armor, the jagged edge where the arm had been. The armor had been empty in the end, the absence of the limb a lie. Gladio could have died there. Nobody would have known.

   "The young king speaks for you," one says. "We accept."

Gladio exhales.

   "We leave you whole for the sake of the Chosen King. You are a Shield. You cannot protect him otherwise."

   "You will remain as you are."

Gladio swallows. He nods.

   "But," and this voice is heavy, "You pass with him."

Gladio looks up.

The phantom figures are faceless, towering. They stand impassive before him.

   "When it is his time." The voices ring.

   "You follow."

Gladio looks down at his hands. Flexes them. There's a bitter taste like blood in his mouth. He shouldn't have come here.

That's nothing new, he realizes.

"Well." The ring still hums on his finger. He barely feels it now. His voice is quiet, distant in his own ears. "Guess that's what I'm here for."

The flicker of crystal light changes for a moment.

"You speak brave," a voice says at last. It sounds cold, but somehow amused. "For one unworthy."

 

The figures are beginning to turn hazy. Gladio's breath feels warm again. Color bleeds back into his vision before him, movement beyond the shadows.

   "Go," the voices say.

   "Leave."

   "You shall not come before us again."

"Wait," Gladio finds himself calling out. He can taste fear like ash, sweat on his brow. Noct. He needs to... "He needs your help," Gladio says. He licks his lips; tries to banish the tremor from his voice. "We all do."

   "Then he will come to us," the voices say.

Gladio clenches his hand. Unclenches it.

He might be unworthy. Traitor. He'd taken the ring. He should be dead, at any rate.

But his father — his father _is_ dead.

Dead with so many more. Sons and daughters of Lucis. Insomnia is gone, Altissia in ruins. Lucis is crumbling as they speak, and the Oracle is dead, and Noct is grieving, and they are all of them wounded, and the kings? Where were the kings then?

Where are they now, silent as their Chosen King suffers, afraid to wake them?

_Is this what Noct is afraid of?_

Sweat drips down the side of Gladio's face. He has to know. They've spared him, and he will never be here again — what more does he have to lose?

He voices his question, one last daring try.

"When?" Gladio says.

The voices laugh.

They say,

   "You fear death?"

   "You fear the future?"

   "You fear for the present."

   "It is not for a mortal to know."

Regis' voice comes at the end.

_"The Chosen King will come when he is ready."_

Regis Lucis Caelum would know.

The Chosen King, Gladio thinks bitterly, doesn't want his destiny. Perhaps the Chosen King would have been ready if the Lucii hadn't left him to rot.

Gladio's voice rasps, dull. "How soon is that going to be?"

Regis sounds sad when he replies —

    **"Sooner than you will hope, before the end."**

And Gladio knows that's all the answer he will get.

   "Do not come back here, Shield."

The pain flares to life in his arm again, a deep faint ache, throbbing like the wash of an elixir over a torn limb. The Lucii are fading. Gladio feels the weight lifting from him even as the icy voices echo.

   "You shall leave us."

   "Return before your time — "

   " — before the King no longer has need of you — "

   "And the King," a voice says, sharp like a blade, "will have another Shield."

Gladio's heart stops.

Another Shield.

_Iris._

"Don't," the word slips from his mouth, threaded with terror. _Iris._ She was the only one — the only one he'd been able to — the only one he had left. Gods. Would he ever stop _failing?_ "Please." He's begging. He doesn't care.

The voices heed him not. Eons have passed for them. Even newest among them cannot save them all.

   "Go," they say. "Do your duty."

They fade.

 

He wakes on his knees.

There's something wet on his face. Noct is on his knees in front of him, panicked and sheet-white, the ring on the floor behind him where he'd wrenched it off and tossed it aside. Prompto and Ignis haven't moved.

"Gladio?" Noct's voice is pitched high. "Fuck, Gladio, what — what the hell were you thinking?"

Gladio knocks Noct's hand away. He can't breathe. He buries his face in his arms for a second, willing air back into his lungs.

"You could've _died_ , you — "

Was dead, Gladio thinks dully. For a second. For an eternity.

Gladio raises his head. He looks at Noct's stricken face, blue eyes wide and terrified.

"Well. Ain't that my job?" Gladio says. His own voice sounds flat, broken to him. "Die for the king?"

Noct reels back.

Gladio sees Noct's expression slam shut, shock turning into something hurt and furious. He feels a slow satisfaction — do you hear that, Noct? Hear it now? — but the feeling is hollow, empty. _I would. We would. Always. Didn't you know?_

"That's not what I want," Noct says, numb. "I never wanted it."

Gladio's arm feels like lead. He tries to push himself back to his feet. He doesn't look at Noct as he rises, doesn't look at the king he was sworn and spared to protect.

_Chosen King._

Noct was ten years old when Gladio first knew him. Gladio was thirteen. _He remembers._

Noct looks helpless, wretched. He looks down at his feet. "I just — I need more time," he whispers.

There's never enough time.

Regis' voice rings in Gladio's ears. _Sooner than you will hope._

Lump in his throat, Gladio pushes his way out of the compartment. Someone, probably Prompto, calls out his name. He doesn't turn around.

  

Behind him, Noct stares down at the ring on the floor.

Eventually, he picks it up again.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> talk to me about Gladio and Noct's yelling matches at [mushydesserts.tumblr.com](https://mushydesserts.tumblr.com/)


End file.
